Now, THAT’S religious persecution

BBC News: Pakistani gets life for blasphemy
Iqbal Ahmad, a member of the Ahmediya community, was found guilty of being disrespectful to the Prophet Muhammad in a mosque near Faisalabad.

Mr. Ahmad joined the Islamic Ahmediya sect, which seems to have been the wrong flavour for his accusers.  They found his brand of devotion violated the constitutional amendment passed 30 years ago that declared the sect “beyond the faith.”  He now faces life imprisonment.  His lawyers are appealing the verdict.

Our culture-war election saw a lot of hyperbole about how fundamentalists were taking over the country and pushing us toward a theocracy.  In light of what happened to Mr. Ahmed, it certainly is worth asking how far down that road we want to go.  After all, the wall of separation between church and state (a phrase invented by Thomas Jefferson, BTW) has worked pretty well so far.  At least, no religion, or religious person, suffers from it.

But I would like to see us all take a break from tossing rhetoric-bombs at each other to discuss: is there a qualitative similarity between what happened to Mr. Ahmed and the current climate here?  If so, is the answer to stifle religious speech by government employees, or is it more tolerance on both sides?

No one ever sees themselves as being intolerant.  But ask yourself how it would be received if a teacher didn’t pledge allegiance to the flag for reasons of personal ethics.  Would that be respected in your community, or would that be the beginning of the end for that teacher?  Likewise, does the freethinking community jump on every use of the word “God” in a public context like a doberman on raw steak?

Hmmm… Wonder if Mr. Ahmed has any thoughts about religious tolerance now?  It’s entirely possible his only regret is that his side isn’t in power.  I wonder.

Posted by George on 11/30/04 at 10:10 PM
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Cave-man CSS study

I’m slowly picking my way through The CSS Anthology by Rachel Andrew, where I’m learning how web page formatting is done in the way-cool near-future. 

You can see little changes, like my misty-blue links that light up when you hover over them with the mouse. (Hopefully they’re readily identifiable as links, while not as clunky as the old “blue-underline” standard.) But major DOF site design changes with a graphically distinct look are just getting started.

CSS is fun!  It makes so much more sense than the old raw-HTML formatting way.

Posted by George on 11/30/04 at 11:36 AM
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Presidential pardons for gun-buying car thieves

I’ve completely misjudged president George “W” Bush - he’s really an old softie.  Here’s a story that just warmed my heart:

As you know, Presidents often issue several pardons for no apparent reason right around Thanksgiving, along with a traditional pardon for a thanksgiving turkey.  Bush did this, and one of the people he pardoned has an interesting angle - he sought a presidential pardon in order to buy a gun.

Richard Morse stole a car in 1963 when he was almost late getting back to his Air Force base in Biloxi, Mississippi.  He served six months, was honorably discharged, and went on to live an exemplary life. 

But in 1998, he tried to buy a shotgun for his son at a Maine gun dealer.  The dealer checked Morse’s record, found he was a convicted felon, and refused to sell him the gun (as he was required to under the Brady bill.)  This didn’t seem right to Morse, a gun activist, and he took it mighty personally.  He began trying to clear his name, and this year his efforts finally led to The White House and a presidential pardon.

There’s just enough goofyness to this story to obscure the serious problem:  Morse was never convicted of a violent crime.  He has lived a good life and was never in trouble again.  Yet, he was lumped in with violent people in the record.  The law is not sufficiently discriminating: it says; “felony conviction.”

This means people convicted of a long string of misdemeanor assaults would be able to guy a gun, but an upstanding guy who 36 years previously had swiped a car purely for transportation gets held up.  It doesn’t make any sense.

Is there a way to make laws make sense?  Could we have a “Sense-making review committee” for laws as they make their way through the process before passage?

No word on whether the turkey was allowed to buy a gun, however.

Posted by George on 11/29/04 at 07:46 PM
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Movie review: The Incredibles

I really liked Brad Bird’s 1999 The Iron Giant, a quirky animated tale about a boy and his giant robot.  When I first saw it at the historic Normal theater, I had no idea that Warner Brothers had botched the release, shutting out Bird from his labor of love.  But most likely now, WB is eating crow 3 meals a day as Bird’s Pixar film, The Incredibles mops up a well-deserved victory at the box-office. 

If you don’t normally go see animated movies, make an exception for this one.  Here’s the setup: after meeting every villain and hazard, the world’s superheroes are finally defeated and forced into obscurity by a barrage of lawsuits.  Somehow, that is so believable…

Mr. Incredible (who is married to Elasti-girl) whiles away his life as an insurance adjuster, a job he hates.  No superheroing is allowed anywhere.  It is an oppressive and suffocating premise that sets up the movie’s subtext of society’s “celebration of mediocrity.”  Again; believable because it is so familiar.

I’m not going to bore you with a bunch of details and irrelevant history: you can click on the links I’ve provided for that.  Just go see the movie!  After The Iron Giant I could easily have been let down but this movie lifted me up.  If you like smart, fun movies, it will lift you up, too.

Posted by George on 11/26/04 at 09:46 PM
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Long Weekend Tidbits

Here are three things I’m enjoying thinking about right now:

1) Cold weather has come to the midwest, and my Lenox furnace is grumbling away keeping me warm.  Ever wonder where the natural gas comes from?  Well, from the ground, of course; but how does it get to your gas meter?  The complexity of that system is staggering and contains many sub-systems along the way.  Read about one of those sub-systems on Mostly Cajun.  It will give you a new appreciation for all the people behind your thermostat.

2) Next time someone tells you that American society is inherently violent and that we just have a sick culture, think about this report in BBC Online, about a spate of school violence in China, where there has been a string of stabbings, Columbine-style.  Only… with a twist: one fellow broke into a dormatory and stabbed 8 boys to death as they slept.  Is there a way to blame this on American culture?  You can bet someone will try.

3) Next time someone tries to have “Intelligent Design” (which is really Creationism in drag) introduced into your school’s biology program in the name of “fairness,” wrestle with the idea that “fairness” requires giving equal time to every ding-bat idea that someone wants to expose your kids to.  Over on Unscrewing The Inscrutable, a Thanksgiving-fed DarkSyd had time to explore the idea in depth.

Well, I’m off to pay bills and go see The Incredibles.  At least one of those should be fun - I’m betting it will be the movie.

Posted by George on 11/26/04 at 11:09 AM
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Thanksgiving and Snow pictures

Back in ‘82, I had a job in a photo processing lab that catered to advertising photographers.  But the owner knew his bread would pick up a lot of butter if we also processed people’s snapshots as well, so we put in a drive-up window and several kiosks, and watched the 35mm rolls come rolling in.

I learned to expect several things: 

  • After the 4th of July, we would have a couple hundred rolls of pictures with the backs of people’s heads washed out by flash, and a tiny, blurry fireworks display in the middle of the picture.
  • After any major concert, we would have a couple hundred rolls of pictures of the backs of people’s heads washed out by flash, and a tiny stage in the middle that may or may not have been the featured performer’s act.
  • After the first snow, we’d get several hundred rolls of pictures of… well, pictures of grey snow, as if it was the first time anybody had ever seen snow up in the mountains of East Tennessee.  But snow isn’t grey.

You know that snow is white; so do I and so does a five-year-old child.  But cameras back then did not know that snow is white…

Continued...

Posted by George on 11/25/04 at 03:23 PM
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State Patrol nightmare


It’s been awfully nice weather this fall in Illinois, right up through yesterday.  But today, (busiest travel day of the year,) what happens? Rather sub-optimal driving conditions, to say the least.

Howling winds across I-74, icy roads, and the usual cast of geniuses who think it’s a contest to see how far they can push the envelope in “bad-weather speeding.” 

And here’s what we found “back in Normal:”

The trip from Normal, to Urbana, to Normal, was uneventful for us except for lots of interesting stuff to look at.

We saw one total genius whose Jeep had slid halfway down a steep embankment towards a creek.  Someone was in the driver’s seat while two guys were trying to push the Jeep uphill... that is, they were standing downhill of it in the snow.  Wonder if they thought for one second what would happen if they slipped and the Jeep started to slide back down the hill. Unfortunately no picture of that.

I sure do appreciate the State Patrol, ambulance, fire, tow-trucks, etc. who have to deal with days like this When they’d rather be home with their families. (pictures by one of my passengers except when car was not moving.)

Posted by George on 11/24/04 at 06:10 PM
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Scalia versus history

Sometimes you have to wonder who’s steering this tub.  Check out this review of Newsday’s interview with justice Scalia on The Revealer.

By the way, The Revealer is an excellent site if you are interested in issues of religion and society.  Definitely worth putting in your RSS feed.

Posted by George on 11/24/04 at 12:08 PM
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Killing over five million people a year

Researchers at Harvard and Queensland have calculated that smoking is bumping off around 5m people a year. 

Place all those dead people side-by-side in coffins 2 feed wide, and it would stretch nearly 1,900 miles.  Start digging!  And be ready to do it again next year, and the next, and the year after that. And so on until…

Well, I don’t really know when it’s going to stop.

No, I’m not pitching for anti-smoking laws.  But for gossake, put out that cigarette. 

On the other hand, maybe Al Qaeda just needs to chill out with a nice, relaxing smoke.

Posted by George on 11/24/04 at 10:13 AM
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A patch for human credulity

Most computer attacks are directed at the computer itself; phishing attacks are directed at the user.  The official-looking phishing messages are designed to fool people into revealing confidential information like credit card numbers, Social Security numbers, and the like.

A BBC Online report on “phishing attacks” says that in October, over six thousand new varieties of phishing message found their way into the world’s inboxes.  Why so many?

Because something like five percent of people fall for it.

There’s no software you can buy to protect you from yourself.  But urging people to “be smarter” is not likely to help.  For one thing, it’s insulting.  People who have credit card accounts to phish aren’t usually dumb.  After all, they hold down a job, drive a car, and handle the other demands of everyday life.

The problem isn’t lack of intelligence; it’s too much trust.  Most of us can trust the people we know to some extent.  We do business with companies we trust.  When we see an official-looking email that seems to be from one of those companies, a trust response is triggered.  So we don’t question the message.

Just so you know: the message looks official because someone is trying to fool you.  Your bank or credit-card company will never ask you for that kind of information in an email.  Here’s what you need to know:

  • Your bank already knows the information, so they won’t ask you for it
  • Don’t even bother reading messages like that - they’re not from your bank
  • Never respond to phishing or spam messages in any way
  • Just delete the message

If’n it don’t look right, don’t smell right, don’t feel right… ‘tain’t right!

Posted by George on 11/24/04 at 10:07 AM
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Order to Chaos

If anyone out there is exceptionally bored and is trying to figure out the “scheme” to my links and subject categories, forget it: there isn’t any. 

That’s two taxonomies needed: posts and links.  ***Dave wrestled with the same thing a while back but as far as I know, nobody’s come up with the grandly wonderful, obvious, supercalifragilistic category scheme.  But I will need something pretty soon.

Maybe I’ll ponder it this afternoon while sitting in the dentist chair waiting to find out if I get to keep my left upper canine tooth.

POSTSCRIPT: 3:00 pm, same day… My miraculous dentist, Dr. Beer (Yes, that is his name…  imagine when people think when they see that on your Meeting Maker schedule) was able to save the tooth, using his amazing ceramic milling machine. 

Picture this… you go in with a tooth that had been broken off once by bruxism, below the gum line.  The dentist designs a crown on his computer, and using a computer-guided milling machine, makes you a new tooth out of ceramic.  6 months later, you have a bicycle accident, and crack the crown.  Three months after that, the crown fails.  Your dentist calls up the digital file of the ceramic crown, pops a blank into the milling machine, and 15 minutes later has a replacement part for your tooth.  He removes the failed crown, installs the new one (setting the adhesive with ultraviolet light) and you walk out with a perfect tooth.

I’m still working on a set of categories for my blog, though.  Dr. Beer worked so fast there wasn’t time to come up with anything.

Posted by George on 11/23/04 at 11:37 AM
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X-rays prove I still have a shoulder

Had the 3-month x-rays of my broken scapula from the accident in August, and it has knit together just fine.  So now I have the OK to start weight-training again, plus physical therapy to “stabilize” the joint, which has become very weak from non-use.

My knees have degraded significantly from 3 months of no bicycling, but since my balance has not recovered, it isn’t safe for me ride.  (The other day I turned in the kitchen and lost my balance completely.)  So I will be adding a stationary bike component to my PT routine.  There are also some new range-of-motion exercises.

Got to adding up the number of concussions in my life, and the number is higher than I thought.  There was the shot-put incident in 3’d grade, the fall from the horse in 5th grade, getting thrown from a dune buggy in 9th grade, slipping on the ice once after high school and once again in 1983.  Walking into the low pipe 2 years ago and then the accident this summer.  This exercise in addition was prompted by an article on post-concussion syndrome.  Maybe I should just wear a helmet all the time. 

I’ll be seeing the audiologist soon to see about the balance problem, and with new PT routines, I’ll be improving steadily.  Right now I’m tired and going to bed.

Posted by George on 11/22/04 at 09:13 PM
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Everyday Miracles

I wrote this originally for my old website, and thought Thanksgiving ‘04 would be a good time to transplant it to my new blog.

Everyday Miracles

Usually when a person says something is miraculous, they mean that it is “unexplainable by the laws of nature and so is supernatural in origin or an act of God.”

While this usage is common, I don’t use it, because I believe the laws of nature are never violated. (Occasionally our understanding of them is incomplete.)

Once a religious believer told me he felt sorry for me, having to live in a “world without miracles.”

But wait - there is another definition of “miracle,” as “a person, thing, or event that excites wonder or admiring awe.” This is closer to the Latin miraculum “to wonder at,” or mirum “wonderful.”

By this definition I can never get to the end of miracles all around me. Like the favorite poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay that begins “Oh, world, I cannot hold thee close enough,” I constantly embrace things that fill me with wonder and awe. The walk from parking garage to office in the morning can be a rapture, along with the unexpected delight of favorite music or even swirls in a coffee cup. Living creatures, the sky, the endless expanse of the universe, the hydrodynamics of raindrops are all in their own way, miraculous.

Which leads me to the unexpected joy of even remembering some of my favorite music at 4:00 this morning when sleep would not return to me. I wondered: who would have predicted, while listening to a ludicrous boy-band singing “I wanna hold your hand,” that the same group would later produce the stirring “Let It Be” or the transcendently beautiful “Blackbird?”

No one can produce a solidly documented “miracle” by the first definition - let them try! But the other kind of miracle, the kind that happens all the time everywhere, goes begging for appreciation while we chase spirits. And who is poorer for that?

- George Wiman, April 2003

Postscript: 05 December ‘04: I just ran across this quote:

“Men talk about Bible miracles because there is no miracle in their lives. Cease to gnaw that crust. There is ripe fruit over your head.”
- Henry David Thoreau

Posted by George on 11/22/04 at 07:20 AM
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Jobs for out-of-work snipers

I see this all the time on campus, and very few solutions come to mind.  Maybe… a sniper up on top of the parking garage.  It would give those special-ops guys something to do when the war is over.

Try to imagine: you’re a student at a state university.  You are not rich: that’s why you have a cheap bicycle that you depend on to get across campus to your morning class or your afternoon job.  One morning, you’re running late - everything seems to go wrong.  Finally you burst out the revolving door in front of your dorm and - ! - some drunken jerk has bent the wheel of your bicycle just for fun.  Your bike cannot be used and it would cost more than it’s worth to fix it.

(There were five bikes on that one rack with severely bent wheels.  And several more on the rack next to it.  It’s nothing new - I’ve been walking through the campus for 20 years and it happens every semester.)

I hope I never see anyone do it.

Posted by George on 11/21/04 at 01:31 PM
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Tinkering with complicated machinery

I’m used to the innards of mechanical and electrical things.  As a child I used to watch my dad restoring antique clocks and guns, fixing the car, and plumbing the house.  I used to repair cameras before it just became impossible in a small shop.  I’m restoring a 37-year-old car and I did computer repair full-time for five years.  So when I get a shiny new machine, I can’t resist pulling off the cover plates and looking inside.  All my adult life I’ve made a living doing that.

Expression engine is alien to me.  There are obviously new concepts to grasp;  I love that.  I change one little thing, save the change, and see what it does.  A picture is developing in my mind - still a bit hazy but it will come clearer as I go.  Today I got “extended text” working, so I can make my home page entries shorter and let those who care click on “Read more…” 

I just ordered The CSS Anthology, 101 essential tips, tricks, and hacks by Rachel Andrew.  Rachel is a skinny, urban web-designer chick with orange hair the color of fall leaves.  Why they put her picture on the book page, I don’t know.  Do they not want any readers over 30?  Then again, after reading the sample chapters, I bought the book, and I’m… over 30.   

Posted by George on 11/20/04 at 12:46 PM
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